It was night and gloomy and somber and serene. There was the wardrobe in front of me and on its higher corners dust had gathered and yet within the somberness the wooden fabric seemed to stretch out cosmically, darkly away. I was sitting and looking at my computer when I stumbled upon NGC 1569 – a giant red-tinted galaxy not too far away from ours.
Looking at it I imagined a primordial cosmos stretching valiantly away with worlds and halls and ceremonious surfaces and deafened stars and shadowed wardrobes appearing stiltedly in somber rooms and hidden corners on planets synonymous to ours and ghostly cosmic intelligence be it good or evil producing barbaric tunes and swift cadences shifting and shifting away, tinted irregardless in crescents and half-moons like a million eyes in shadowy shards of coruscating red.
It was red. It was irrevocably red and I thought about dreams that I’ve had concerned with that color; there would be tiled floors in black and white and gloomy corners and worlds fleeting in somber darkness like stilted diamonds on the edge of far-flung nocturnal cosmic recesses; the serious monotonous ventures of time and space hitting the brain in rapid continuity; the primordial outlines of a gigantic galaxy blaring through the mind in reddened rapidity.
Maybe the edges of the wardrobe, infinitely lonesome and haltingly shadowed – illuminated solely by the lightbulb in the room – would be mimicked endlessly in galaxies like NGC 1569 in taunting haughty beauty and red eyed monsters would glare toward them remorselessly deep within the reddened galaxy they call their home and that would be an austere gesture like the endlessness of somber ventures and dusty corners and moon-filled evening hours.
Then I had two dreams.
I was running into the night. The pale moon was up and coloring my footsteps in orange from afar. The sea projected in a clear blue range to my left; small stars corrugating the silver foamy tips of little waves and mixing in through the darkness with the thoughts in one’s mind. The stars were like fruit pieces thrown rapidly within a dark drink; the cosmos surrounding them seemed somewhat empty and distant, like a window protracting over an endless sill.
I was walking now. I was seventeen and the night was a special time for me. The love of the moon and the sea and the stars made me believe in the shadowy darkness, in the lost whisperings of cool girls standing over empty spaces and the big basketballs hurled upward toward the soft pieces of fruit in that dark drink we call the night sky.
I was skirting a part of the city and walking slowly in the night and looking toward the sea and occasionally toward the road in front of me. The sidewalks surrounding it on both sides seemed magical, they seemed like whiter flowers blossoming around a gray doorframe and waiting for particular passersby to stare in light astonishment and continue walking.
I finally neared an enclosed space where other teenagers played basketball. They hurled the balls and ran and jumped and shouted occasionally with stern laughter peering through their cheeks and echoing alongside the pale echoes the night sea brings to recognition. The space where the young played was enclosed vividly past the left sidewalk; to the right was the sea. There was something magical in their movements and their laughter. Their breath partook of the exuberant magic youth brings after every evening has passed and darkened shadows stare deep within the retinas of the young and make them feel sublime and carefree and happy in a ghostly, starry, unexpressed way. The orange moon passed.
In this dream I too dreamed of a big court in the night. There was a lonesome basketball being thrown up toward the stars and on the sides of the court dark shadows danced in phantom glory. The basketball rose and rose amid the silver gleams of the fluorescent stars and it was night and you felt – you felt somehow younger and cooler and lightly exhilarated by the breathless darkness. Suddenly, in the dream, I left the ball alone and looked at my sneakers over the polished ground. They were brown and red and seemed a part of an unexpressed, beautiful nightly reality that belonged to high rooms and low desks and many ghostly faces. I looked at my sneakers again as I drifted further on to sleep. Brown and red… Brown and red… Brown and red…
The basketball shot through the hoop and fell down. I blinked. The night wind hissed in some distant green trees. The moon was bright and the stars were shining silver. I breathed in of the air. Soon the court was abandoned and only the slow patter of sneakers could be heard in the moonlight. It was a special night. A type of night that may exist only in one’s youth and is left to be repeated forever in memory; a type of magic which comes and goes away on its own; a type of breathless yearning for the mysteries of silver evenings and lonely footfalls… Like that time you walked through a street before dawn and felt the distant dark sky and sighed and reminisced over the faintly dark pathways and thought about life and the previous evening and life again. Like that time you walked through the city at night and breathed in of dreamy and unseen thoughts in the haze of the light wind’s receding hush upon the sidewalks and cafes and parks. Like that autumn you saw the colorful leaves on the trees and thought about the times when you were younger.
Fade away lonely footfalls… Fade into brown and red and brown and red and brown and red again.
The second dream was a little different and came right after.
I was driving about the suburban road. The sky was flaming in tints of red and paler blue and the hiss of the engine felt monotonous and overbearing in the soft silence. There were many trees and gorges and valleys to my right and pale birds hooting upon high branches and the sun shining in its frail sunrays which transformed the surrounding dust into magical, faintly glaring sunshine. My car wobbled and turned and shifted upward and down and veered over the uneven surface of the road while I pulled the clutch and turned the wheel until I came upon a familiar mowed down clearing, pulled the parking brake, got out my tent, locked the car and commenced to gaze over the brow of a particular hill sprayed with fainter and darker green.
I had been to this clearing often and slept in the darkness of night and heard the familiar birds hoot and other animals scurry while the stars gazed down upon me overbearingly and I dreamt of unfamiliar spaces and portrayals of light and cubical nightly forms which existed only on the outskirts of the cosmos. It had been a monotonous experience, stirred vaguely by science fiction and the distant dreams that come to us unexpectedly and leave the imagination scarred by lurid imagery, evermore curious, evermore undetached. An incomparable and quivering prelude to the encompassing and illuminating happenings which would diminish the meaning of those earlier dreams and times, of my adventurous and ebullient temperament, and in their new light make me think again.
All this came to me as a shadowed sequence of something I felt I knew innately and subconsciously as if it had been done countless times beforehand; and yet it appeared only on the verge of a single dream. Furthermore I felt the reality of unreality like a palpable phantom from a past day portraying his lingering white hand into my vision and making me think I was living everything in a breathless hush of starry indulgence.
That night was no different. When the clock hit ten o’clock it was already dark; that uncertain premature blue darkness that wafts gone leaves down forgotten tracks and through which the first stars cast indefinite shadows; within which the mind softly portrays the deafened and overbearing silhouettes of beautiful and regretful contemplations from immemorial days. It was cool to let one’s eyes close and drift on away to sleep and feel the faint hiss of the nearby lake and imagine a fuller, mightier sky where the stars seeped down golden octagons of light and the magic of the surrounding scenery brought breathless ventures to the mind. It was beautiful and strangely incommunicable; much like the incalculable glories of space that weave golden dreams and emboss innumerable sci-fi novels, glaring movies and papered worlds, gliding through the endless blackness and developing softer portrayals of glamorous hidden entities, reaching with infinite power to the somber and secluded verges of the cosmic intellect, gathering from the depthless verges of space the somber revelations of life and death.
Suddenly, still within the softness of my dream, I woke up. There was a gray disc, illuminated by fainter moonlight, hovering over the distant trees. The blood in my veins froze. I began to shake wildly and closed my eyes. I felt weightless, as though my body were brought into a different plane of reality of which physical reasoning and law partook no longer. I felt as though I were shuddering and convulsing and that the darkened corners of space throbbed with a million irreversible signs and irrefutable logic, glaring upon my mind from millions of dusky, interstellar corners, veiled in a somber prehistoric pall. I opened up my eyes only to be dazzled out of my state of contemplations by a frail yellow light. I swiftly turned my head backwards and saw the top of the trees. Frightened, I realized in seconds that I was above them and being dragged remorselessly forward into the sky. The gray disc was right above me and I could see the faint yellow light protracting endlessly from a round circular portal at its bottom. I blinked once, twice…
When I woke up, I was upon a dark bed in a dark room. I could feel as though my body was travelling a million miles per hour and felt the unreality of reality hit me and capture my perceptions in a vile grip. I heard thunder and in time saw innumerable biting little lights around me; I heard the chanting of barbaric trumpets and was able to make out a tiny screen on the wall in front of me. On it flashed images of human skulls and the paler verges of space and low monotonous mumbles issued out from the walls. I felt dizzy and weak. Suddenly, a gloomy dark microphone appeared on the screen and then the images panned slowly away to unravel a lonely black pulpit on which the microphone was erected inside of a tall darkened auditorium, seamlessly bound within a questionable building. Then, from another perspective, there appeared the building, like a half-forgotten dream bleakly surfacing and fading out steeply before comprehension could arrive; yet stamped surely upon the memory, like the deafening silence outlining endlessly the turn of the clock. The building was black and cubical and from within were issued out darkened booming sounds which shook and it seemed that from that lonesome, unimaginable microphone, covered in remorseless darkness, trickled down unheard of and foreboding tunes into the timeless, indefinite edges of space.
It seemed as though the technology inside of the gray disc was primordial and controlled all sound, all vision, every aspect, tint and outline that had ever arisen from the monstrous, shadowy, unprobed depths of the darker side of space. Suddenly, I heard light crackling sounds, barely above the field of perception, edging into the room. Then I saw fallen stars; heard barbaric melodies and jumpy, irresistible laughter. I saw a thousand earths explode and a million suns collapse and murky waters and gloom-filled spaces and innumerable microphones shuddering in darkened, unattainable places, bordering on the edge of lucid dreams into the spaces our minds had heretofore left unpenetrated. Then I heard a loud booming sound and a brief shudder of white stars. I closed my eyes and felt like falling through a million years in time; embalmed in shards of reddened shine.
Within that dream’s continuity I felt that I still remembered those times. I remembered vividly waking up in my tent in the morning after the abduction and getting into my car and driving automatically all the way home. My mind had been into a different place, a place I thought was impossible to exist. Toward the end of the dream, I came to a cognizant recollection that made me think many a time that I had only scarcely and amorphously witnessed the entire thing, but upon thinking again that thought had always become dissuaded; the abduction was there. Within this end’s unassuming edge my life didn’t change a lot, except my vicarious perceptions about the world had shifted all the laughable and fictional improbabilities into potential possibilities and my outlook upon the undefined strata of the universe had become broader, fueled by my experience. I still ate my breakfast in the morning with the rays of the sun covering my plate and got my work done through most of the day and came back home in the evening, tired and thinking about a lot of things. Sometimes when I slept, I would dream. And sometimes I would still hear the faint echoes and see that darkened place. The place with the building and the auditorium and the microphone. And I would drift away; and I would drift away…
And then I woke up. I felt strangely jubilant and strangely relieved that the latter sequence of my life and the former unpremeditated encounter had been fictionalized through brief minutes in the unawakened state. However, when I got out of bed and went to the bathroom to brush my teeth I noticed a triangular red scar upon my right hand. Within the three-sided polygon was written simply, “NGC 1569.”
Credit: Victor Grant
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